Project Logs

My name's Eric and I'm joining the Barnabas Innovation Group. I was brought on to this project to help out with this little guy;

This is the board that Josh developed, and it is incredible. This little dude can essentially act as an entire vex brain! We at Barnabas Robotics are super excited to see what this thing can do for ourselves, and partner with Josh to come up with some applications for it, such as a robot chassis for it.

Before we can do anything like that, however, I had to put one together myself. Luckily the soldering stencil we had made the re-flow soldering process far easier than it could have been. So now from here we need to burn bootloaders into the two microcontrollers used and then we can start programming this bad boy. After that it's off to the races.

Last week we took a trip down to South LA to meet with Josh, a man trying to make a difference in the inner city through robotics. He showed us some of his amazing creations, including a computer controlled car that could follow a curved path as well as a learning how to code program he wrote with 99 different levels! The whole experience was amazing and motivational.

Last week we met with Josh at his home down in South LA. This guy is a pastor, hardware guy and software guru, and an all around awesome guy. He showed us a demo of his robotics hardware and software that he put together over the past year. We'll be creating an open-source project around his platform. More later!

We met this week to come up with a mission statement for our project. This statement will guide our discovery, interpretation, ideation, experimentation and evolution phases of our project. After two hours of brainstorming, we didn't end up with aconcise statement, but we got close. Homework this week... come up with a mission statement! More next week :).

I interviewed two children of different ages and one adult today; they answered questions relating to what toys they are most likely to buy and which ones kids are most entertained by. Gained insight into what activities are best and worst for children.